Harold Meyerson

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AP Photo/Steve Helber Democratic gubernatorial candidate Lieutenant Governor Ralph Northam, left, waves to the crowd as Governor Terry McAuliffe applauds during a rally in Richmond V irginia’s gubernatorial race is tightening. According to a Washington Post poll the lead Democrat Ralph Northam holds over Republican Ed Gillespie has narrowed from 13 points earlier this month to just five points. The poll makes clear that Gillespie has consolidated support among the Old Dominion’s Trump supporters: 95 percent of those voters favor Gillespie. Northam though has failed to reel in a comparable share of voters who disapprove of Trump: 81 percent of the anti-Trump electorate back him. The numbers suggest that some Republicans who dislike Trump are nonetheless voting for Gillespie—a more conventional Republican and seemingly more normal human being than the president (admittedly, a low bar to clear) Gillespie’s challenge has been to win over the party’s Trumpian base. To that end, his...

AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite Senator Bob Corker speaks with reporters as he walks to the Senate floor B ack in the 1970s, I belonged to a small left-wing group that enjoyed minor successes and major failures in recruiting new members. We did very well at enlisting the top leaders of large organizations, unions in particular. We didn’t do well at all when it came to recruiting the rank-and-file members of those organizations. All of which led my friend Jim Chapin to comment, “We’re not even organized top-down. We’re organized top-sideways.” Chapin’s line, it seems to me, is a pretty fair description of today’s anti-Trump Republicans. Some of the GOP’s pre-eminent political leaders—George W. Bush, John McCain, Bob Corker, Jeff Flake—have made clear their belief that President Trump is a pox on the Republican Party, the United States, and common decency. So have many of the country’s most prominent conservative writers, including George Will, Michael Gerson, Ross Douthat, Jennifer Rubin...

(AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais) California Senator Dianne Feinstein on July 12, 2017 H as Dianne Feinstein outlived her moment? The five-term Democratic senator from California, who is also, at 84, the Senate’s oldest member, provoked a flood of such speculation when she announced on Monday that she had decided to run yet again for re-election. Democrats have moved left, pundits noted; California has moved left; and California Democrats have moved more to the left than Democrats anyplace else. Surely, some said, Feinstein’s time had come and gone. Well, not exactly. Feinstein hasn’t outlived her moment because her moment—her time in sync with her fellow California Democrats—never actually existed. In her 25 years in the Senate, she has always stood well to the right of the Golden State’s other elected Democrats, not to mention its Democratic voters. Indeed, Feinstein designed her initial appearance on the stage of statewide politics with the specific intent of showing just how far...

AP Photo/John Minchillo Globalization, Contingent Employment, Non-Compete Clauses, and Now This: A robot works alongside a human, Virginia Beach, 2017. This article appears in the Fall 2017 issue o f The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here . O n the first Friday of every month, the Labor Department releases the latest numbers on employment and wages. Here’s a sampling of recent headlines from the mornings after, which have remained remarkably unchanged month after month: “The Job Market Is Strong, but Wages for Americans Have Barely Rebounded” ( The Washington Post , May), “Jobs Aplenty, but Wages Stagnate” ( The Wall Street Journal , June), “Payrolls Expand, Even as Pay Lags” ( The New York Times , July), “US Jobs Growth Rebounds but Wages Disappoint” ( Financial Times , July). Those “buts” (and the one “even as”) are a shorthand expression of both common sense and the consensus among virtually every school of economic thought: In a market economy, as unemployment falls and...

“Right now, 37 percent of the revenue from the Affordable Care Act goes to Americans in four states,” Louisiana Republican Senator Bill Cassidy, coauthor of the Republicans’ last-gasp effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act, said on Monday. Cassidy’s culprits—the four states at the center of this cosmic injustice—are California, New York, Massachusetts, and Maryland.

“That is frankly not fair,” Cassidy complained.

Well—whose fault is that? California, New York, Massachusetts, and Maryland are among the 31 states (32, if we count the District of Columbia) that agreed to accept federal funds made available by the ACA’s expansion of Medicaid; California and New York are by far the most populous of those 31 states, with nearly 60 million residents combined. Nineteen states, however, chose not to accept the federal funds that would expand their Medicaid rolls. In each of the 19, the decision not to accept the funds was made by the state’s Republican governor. This Republican impulse to discipline the poor, lest they loll around in the comfort of hospital emergency wards, is also reflected in the lower levels of Medicaid benefits that Republican-controlled states generally set.

Cassidy’s chutzpah isn’t confined to hailing as victims the actual perpetrators of the imbalance he describes. His bill to repeal the ACA contains provisions similar to ones in the previous Republican ACA repeal efforts, which the Congressional Budget Office concluded would deny Medicaid benefits to 15 million recipients. His plan is not to erase the gap between blue states and red by expanding Medicaid to eligible recipients in all states, but by throwing millions off the rolls and reducing expenditures to the levels in the neo-Confederacy (nine of the eleven Southern states that formed the Confederacy are among the 19 that refused to accept the Medicaid expansion funds), where the impulse to discipline the poor is made steelier yet by the impulse to discipline blacks and other people of color.

Cassidy’s vision of fairness, finally, is to have no Medicaid at all. That way, the sick and the poor in blue states won’t be able to lord it over the sick and the poor in the red ones. What could be fairer than that?